Read Online The zenith angle by Bruce Sterling - Free Book Online Page B

telephone to a distant woman in Bethesda, Maryland, merely in order to communicate with Kickoff. Kickoff knew no more than a dozen words of Russian. Yet Kickoff was a practical man. If he couldn’t haul his translator into a killing zone, he would simply phone her.
    “We’ve grown so intimate in such a short time, my dear,” the Colonel said into the phone. “Yet I understand we’ll be parting soon.”
    “I’m sad about that, too. But it’s the nature of their business, dear Alexei.”
    Kickoff zippered open his dappled weapons bag. He produced a marvelous, long-barreled sniper rifle, made of carbon fiber, polished fiberglass, and dense white plastic. He then seized the phone and barked into it.
    The Colonel accepted the phone once again.
    “That was a whole lot of stupid technical crap about his big gun,” the woman said. “Are you interested in that? Should I bother?”
    Kickoff was ex-American military—he had a soldier’s eyes—but he was officially a civilian consultant. This was the first time the Colonel had ever seen Kickoff handle a weapon. Kickoff’s lethal machine was a Western .50-caliber rifle, privately produced. Pampered special-ops gangs carried toys of that sort when, unlike Russian troops in Chechnya, they were not killing Moslem terrorists in the mud and blood every single day.
    “Darling, I’m interested if you’re interested. You tell me all about it. Just how wonderful is Kickoff’s big gun?”
    “Oh, in bed, I suppose you mean. Well, he’s wonderful in bed,” said the woman coolly. She was an American, and completely lost to modesty. The Colonel liked her very much for this. It was so refreshing.
    “He’s in good condition, with a handsome face,” the Colonel told her. “Such good teeth Kickoff has.”
    “His name is not ‘Kickoff.’ His name is Michael Hickok.”
    The Colonel mulled over this correction. “Hickok, Kickoff.” For the life of him, he couldn’t hear any difference there. And why would that matter anyway, when they never spoke except through her, their translator? Women had such odd priorities.
    “Does he love you at all?” the Colonel asked. “Does that matter to him?”
    “Not one bit does he love me.” She was bitter. “He doesn’t even know what that means. ‘Have a nice day,’ that is what he tells me. Oh, and he buys me cheap, sexy underwear.”
    “My dear, how is it that we human beings forgot how to love? How did the world even come to such a state?” said the Colonel, warming to his theme. “Since this may be my last chance to ask you, may I seek your customary good advice in an intimate matter? I must decide what to do about Natalya.”
    “You shouldn’t even ask me about that, Alexei. I never have any luck.”
    “If I leave Natalya here, the bandits kill her for being my mistress. If I take her home to Petersburg, the mafia kills her because she is dark. If we stay here in the Caucasus, then they kill both of us, eventually. And then there’s my wife, of course. What on earth is to be done?”
    “All right, I’ll tell you. Get some money and leave Russia. My mother emigrated to New York in 1978. So my dear mother is finally free of Russia, and I, her only beloved daughter, now I have hopeless affairs with crazy American mercenaries.”
    The woman sighed in pain from the far side of the world. “At least ‘Executive Solutions’ got me this great translator job. They’ve got medical, dental, everything. I could get liposuction.”
    Kickoff brusquely seized the phone again.
    “Now he wants you to look through his big rifle’s telescope,” the woman reported. “He’s also angry that you spend so much time talking to me, while you hardly say one single word to him.”
    “That’s because you are so wise and charming, while he is merely a professional killer. Can we discuss something truly important now? My Natalya is the only happy woman in Chechnya. That is the truth. There is something so profoundly erotic about